Behind Death Sentence, Inmate’s Prison Conduct

When a defense lawyer pleaded with a federal jury in Brooklyn this week to impose a life sentence on his client, Ronell Wilson, who had killed two undercover detectives, he argued that prison would not be painless for Mr. Wilson.

He would never again wear civilian clothes, attend funerals, graduations or Christmas celebrations; he would never marry. He would have no privacy, and he would grow older alone and die “a slow death,” the lawyer said. “In the end,” he said, “you’ll find that life in prison is enough.”

But during the monthlong death penalty trial of Mr. Wilson, which ended with a jury’s handing down a death sentence on Wednesday, there was evidence that sharply undercut his lawyer’s contention that life in prison would be a meaningful punishment.

In the 10 years since he was arrested and jailed, Mr. Wilson, a member of the Bloods, inducted other inmates into the gang; bragged about the police killings to prisoners; called for attacks on correction officers; and even realized one of his biggest goals — fathering a son, after a series of trysts with a jail guard.

“He’s not going to stop until he’s dead,” a prosecutor, Celia Cohen, warned the jury.

The verdict, which came after only five hours of deliberation in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, was unusual because Mr. Wilson is the first New Yorker to be sentenced to death in federal court in 60 years.

But this is the second time a federal jury has voted to impose the death penalty on Mr. Wilson — his first death sentence was overturned in 2010 — and even longtime death penalty critics acknowledged on Thursday that the brutal circumstances of his crime, compounded by his behavior in jail, might have explained the jury’s quick decision.

“To the extent his prison behavior contributed to the sentence, then he was his own worst enemy,” said Alan Vinegrad, a former United States attorney in Brooklyn who is now in private practice.

Robert M. Morgenthau, who never sought the death penalty during his 35 years as Manhattan district attorney, and remains a staunch opponent of capital punishment, said that he understood why prosecutors pursued it, given the horrendous nature of this crime. “If you ever sought the death penalty, I mean, this would be the case to seek it,” said Mr. Morgenthau, who served through 2009.

During the trial, because the sentence alone and not Mr. Wilson’s guilt was at issue, more prosecution witnesses testified about the 10 years Mr. Wilson had spent in jail since committing the murders of Detectives Rodney J. Andrews and James V. Nemorin than about the crimes themselves.

One witness said Mr. Wilson had inducted her brother into the Bloods gang. Two Rikers Island guards described how Mr. Wilson had dislocated a guard’s finger as he tried to escape their grip during a walk from the showers. An officer at a federal detention center said Mr. Wilson had used coded calls to provoke other gang members to attack guards.

Photo

A video photo showing Ronell Wilson being removed by guards from a prison recreation area.Credit
United States Department of Justice

An inmate testified that Mr. Wilson threatened him with a homemade knife. And, perhaps most surprisingly, inmates described Mr. Wilson’s interactions with a female guard, Nancy Gonzalez, in an empty room near his cell. One said he saw Mr. Wilson standing near Ms. Gonzalez with his genitals exposed. (The jury did not hear about the baby Mr. Wilson had with Ms. Gonzalez, who recently pleaded guilty to having sex with an inmate.)

Mr. Wilson, 31, has already spent almost one-third of his life behind bars, and he may remain there for years or even decades pending future appeals, lawyers said.

No federal inmate has been executed since 2003, and there are currently 59 people on death row, including Mr. Wilson, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, an advocacy group that is critical of capital punishment. The federal death penalty has also been under legal challenge by death row inmates who claimed that the government’s lethal injection protocol violates their constitutional rights by, among other things, exposing them to a risk of severe pain.

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But given the rarity of federal death verdicts in New York City — the state death penalty was ruled unconstitutional, which is why Mr. Wilson was tried in federal court — the decision to once again sentence Mr. Wilson to death has raised debate over what distinguished him from other notorious defendants, including terrorists and mobsters, for whom juries rejected capital punishment.

Zachary W. Carter, another former Brooklyn United States attorney, said he opposed the death penalty because he believed that it was not imposed fairly and that the system made mistakes. But he said even opponents might find the rare kind of case where they could be persuaded to sentence someone to death.

“In a case where you have someone who has committed a murder for the worst of reasons and expresses no regret and appears to be the kind of person who, left to their own devices, would murder again, that may be the kind,” he said.

Each juror signed a page of the verdict form that affirmed that considerations like race and color had not factored into their decision to impose capital punishment on Mr. Wilson, an African American who grew up in a Staten Island housing project where, his lawyers said, he was exposed to violence and other hardships.

But some lawyers questioned whether such factors did enter into play.

Anthony L. Ricco, who has represented capital defendants in federal and state court, said he believed that Mr. Wilson had hurt himself with his actions while in prison. But Mr. Ricco, who also represents Ms. Gonzalez, said that the speed with which the jury returned its verdict was inappropriate.

He pointed to a frequent criticism of the death penalty, that it is disproportionately applied to minority defendants. In this case, that charge has been muted somewhat because the victims were black, as were both the attorney general who authorized the prosecution and the United States attorney. The jury was racially mixed.

“It comes down to race,” Mr. Ricco maintained. “Nobody wants to say that. To me, the jury already had a sense of where they lined up.” A lawyer for Mr. Wilson, David Stern, declined to comment, as did the Brooklyn United States attorney’s office.

Ephraim Savitt, a lawyer for Mr. Wilson at his first trial, said he believed that his former client could have been confined safely, had the jury returned a life sentence.

“He would have been put in a concrete box for the rest of his life,” Mr. Savitt said.

A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2013, on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Behind Death Sentence, Inmate’s Prison Conduct. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe